Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado | March 31 – May 31, 2016
About the Artist
Sebastião Salgado was born in Aimorés, Brazil in 1944 and worked as an economist for the coffee trade in Paris before becoming a photographer in the early 1970’s. Throughout his forty-year career, he has produced major monographs and has been exhibited around the globe countless times. Salgado has won numerous major awards, including a W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography, and has been named photographer of the year twice by the International Center of Photography. He is a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has photographed for many agencies including the elite photo agency Magnum. In 1994 he and his wife Leila created Amazonas Images in Paris to handle his work exclusively. Since the 1990’s Sebastião and Leila have worked to restore the rainforest surrounding the land where he was raised. In 1998 the pair were successful in establishing Instituto Terra, a nature preserve focused on reforestation and education. Sebastião Salgado continues to photograph today and lives with his wife in Paris, France.
Sebastião Salgado
Known as “the concerned photographer,” Salgado invites his viewers into the lives of people in distress. His exclusively black and white documentary style illuminates pressing social issues.
Between 1984 and 1985, working alongside humanitarian aid group, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Sebastião Salgado traveled to the Sahel region of Africa to document the catastrophic drought and resulting famine which led to thousands of deaths throughout the region.
Between 1986 and 1992 Salgado traveled the globe documenting large scale manual labor, a tribute and exploration of working class men, women and children from gold miners to oil workers.
Between 1993 and 2000 Salgado focused on the theme of mass migration around the world, specifically migrants, refugees and displaced people of more than thirty countries.
One of Salgado’s latest bodies of work, Genesis, was eight years in the making. Genesis highlights the animals, plants and people who inhabit some of the most remote regions of the planet. His hope is to protect the beauty of what is left of the world today and to shed light on what we cannot afford to lose to global climate change.
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